FRA Issues

The proposed law of allowing the Swedish national defence radio establishment FRA to scan any internet traffic leaving Sweden has brought up a lot of protests. Today hundreds gathered outside the riksdag in protest against it.

Although I am worried, I have strong hopes in that the European court of human rights will overthrow the law in the end, as it constitutes massive surveillance of all citizens without discrimination. That is, having wire taps on certain internet connections (i.e. all traffic to and from a specific end point IP address) might be reasonable for the police in order to fight crime; but what the law will introduce is generic deep packet inspection and searching for keywords in all traffic bound to a non swedish destination (for example gmail, hotmail or any other site outside the state). Note that interior traffic is in many cases routed past the borders due to the nature of the internet, so spying on foreign traffic only is impossible to guarantee technically.

Also, monitoring the traffic into other EU states would be spying on their allies and neighbours. The European integration has bound the states and citizens of Europe together, and more and more Europeans are moving to other states, so the deep packet scans will even if they can be guaranteed to only target foreign traffic automatically pick up traffic between thousands of Swedes (100k living in the UK for example), which was not the purpose of the law.

I will not rehash everything here as so many other bloggers have done that already, but the fact that the law proposal which is inherently unconstitutional and not compliant with European law has made it so far suggests that there are problems in the Swedish law making process.

Firstly, I would say that it is now more important than ever before that a constitutional court is established with the role to try law proposals on their compliancy with the Swedish constitution and European law.

The second item that is of interest is that the parliamentarians that have suggested that they oppose the law is more afraid of the party whip than of the people that have elected them. The entire affair has lead me to see the advantage of a majority based system such as the one in the UK. Not that I like that kind of system in general since it result in a massive misrepresentation in the parliament in the UK. What Sweden need now, is a federal constitution that introduce a bicameral parliament. On chamber would then have proportional representation, and then the second would be a majority elected senate and thus directly responsible to the people. Such a senator would be possible to discharge at any time following a vote of no confidence in the district the person was elected in.

As a side note, despite that the current government is doing a great job in general, I would be happy to see it fall because of this.

Science...

Usually I do not write blog entries just reporting on other blogs, except if I have something important to add. But in this case I make an exception. One of the better technical blogs out there, Arstechnica, just published an article about the difference between science and pseudo-science. Most important of all, they take up Homeopathy as an example of pseudo-science.

I have always been annoyed that there are homeopathic shops (both in Netherlands and Sweden), and the government is not doing anything about it. You should of-course be able to sell the stuff, but not in a way that gives an impression that it actually have any healing power.

Head now to Arstechnica and read about the the pseudo-science involved.

Ahhhhhrg!!!

Jag blir mer och mer rädd, vart är vi på väg?

Försvarsministern introducerade just ett förslag som skall ge FRA rätt att övervaka ALL kabeltrafik som går ut från Sverige. Det innebär varenda webbsida du läser (förutom de i Sverige), varenda e-brev du skickar ner till fastlandet med mera. Och om du har e-postservern utanför Sverige, gäller detta även all e-post du skickar inom sverige, eftersom denna kommer gå i kabel över statsgränsen.

Det värsta är dock Oldsbergs newspeek inspirerande uttalande: "Ett viktigt steg för att förbättra skyddet för den enskildes integritet i vårt land."

Staten deklarerar därmed att "två plus två bir fem", men det blir inte sannare för det....

Star Trek Influences

Holm's blog, stardate 60386.5

Some time ago I watched a show on the discovery channel that actually got me thinking quite a bit. The programme was about how Star Trek had changed the world. The show was led by none other than William Shatner, captain of the USS Enterprise in the original series.

I did watch Star Trek when I was younger, the reason for this was my already big interest in space and astronomy. I never really realised until now what influence the show has had on me. Take for example my federalistic stance in politics, I am now pretty sure that this comes from me watching Star Trek, seeing the United Federation of Planets at works in a farly optimistic view of the world. Star Trek is also a show preaching the wonders of technology (this is what the Discovery programme focused on), and this is something that has definately shaped my life.

It should come as no suprise for those that know me that my stance is basically that the solution for most of the problems that we are facing in the world today lies in technology. Technology is infact the ultimate solution and salvation.

Technologies that have been directly inspired by the series are for example the mobile phone, QuickTime and the jet injector (known as the hypospray in Star Trek). There are several more examples of Star Trek inspired technology that exists today or is under development.

Now the only thing I am missing is those lovelly warp drive engines. I refuse to believe people who say it cannot be done. I'll hold my hopes for the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics, hopefully we will get negative gravity, or some energy efficient way to manipulate the gravitational field with magnetism (OK, now I am ramling about stuff that I do not even have the slightest idea of, so I'll stop while I still can).

Live long and prosper!

ITER Agreement Signed

Finally after so many years the EU, US, China, Russia and South-Korea have signed an agreement to build ITER, an international experimental tokamak fusion reactor.

The reactor will be the first step to working fusion power, and it will be succeeded by the DEMO reactor in about 30 years.

The fusion fuels available on the earth and in the rest of the solar system will basically last longer than the sun itself. This is a great leap forward for mankind and will in the end give us clean, safe and cheap energy.

I'm Back... Well Kinda

Some people might be wondering about what's going on and why the blog has not been updated for a long time.

Well, I have moved back to the Netherlands again and started work. Unfortionatelly, my work prevents me from being involved in politics. I will however try to write about technology whenever I have a chance to.

I am truly sorry for any inconveniances my absence have caused.

Happy 9th of May!

The heading really say it all. Happy Europe Day!

Swedish Consulate Grants Visas to Members of Terror Organisations

The Swedish consulate in Jerusalem just granted high ranking minister in the Palestinian government, and member of the terror organisation Hamas, a visa to the Schengen area; this while the French government denied giving visas to Palestinian MPs from Hamas.

The Swedish government will not meet with the terrorist who is invited to attend a meting with Palestinian groups in Malmö, but the event has put further strains on the Swedo-Israeli relations that was severely damaged after the Swedish foreign ministry pulled out the Swedish Air Force from a multi-national exercise in Italy. The exercise had been planned for months and was canceled when the ministry came to know that the Israeli Air Force had been invited to attend.

Of-course, this post is not really here to complain about Hamas, but rather the sloppines of the Swedish government in handeling visas. Interesting in this event is that a Schengen visa gives access to all of Schengen, including France; which by the way should have been asked about any objections to the issuing of visas. It is time to rethink how visas are issued to the EU, and centralise the procedure to the Union.

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